The body, set up in the wake of the expenses scandal, is on collision course with Prime Minister David Cameron, Commons Speaker John Bercow and other MPs who fear a public backlash.

But some politicians feel they are underpaid. Conservative backbencher Mark Pritchard has said he fears too much pay restraint will deter people from poorer backgrounds from standing for parliament.

Mr Pritchard suggests we look at the rest of Europe for a more honest assessment of how generous MPs’ salaries really are. Let’s do just that.

The analysis

We tried to find stats from every country in Europe, but we could only get reliable information from 17 countries: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

International comparisons are tricky because every country has a different system of paying its MPs.

But we can make a start by looking at the basic wage a “backbencher” might expect to get – according to the websites of the various parliaments. This doesn’t include expenses, pension entitlements and so on.

In Britain the current basic MP’s salary is £66,396. That puts us in 11th place out of our 17 countries.

Italian politicians get the most at around £115,000 a year at current exchange rates. The Poles earn the least at just over £23,000. But that doesn’t mean a lot without taking into account the difference in earnings across Europe.

In order to compare like with like, we’ve used 2011 OECD stats for average annual full-time gross wages (there are a few surprises here already: Ireland, whose banks were bailed out by the EU and IMF in 2010, still enjoyed the highest wages in Europe the year after).

Comparing MPs’ basic wages with average earnings gives us a partial insight into how well politicians are paid compared to the average worker.

In Britain a backbench MP gets about 2.25 times the average full-time wage, only the 13th biggest ratio out of the 17 countries.

The biggest gap is in Italy, where an elected representative can expect to get more than £115,000, or more than 5 times the average wage of around £22,000. It’s a very similar ratio in Greece (a little over £88,000 a year for politicians with an average wage of just over £17,000).

Spain sees the smallest disparity between average earnings and politicians’ basic wages – MPs get just over 25 per cent more.

But many Spanish voters will tell you that basic salaries (around £29,000) are not the whole story. The country’s politicians are notorious for claiming generous living expenses and preferring limousines to public transport.

In fact in most countries, including the UK, working out the total financial benefits that come with public office is an extremely complex business.

These figures underestimate politicans’ true earnings in every country, though each system varies in its overall generosity.

In Italy and France in particular, generous unaudited expenses mean real average incomes can approach £165,000 and £145,000 respectively, according to research carried out for the Italian parliament.

In Britain you would have to add gold-plated pension benefits, expenses (a London-based MP could claim more than £200,000 this year) and other perks like “winding-up expenditure” – a £56,450 “golden goodbye” payable to an MP who decides to leave office.

The rights and wrongs of many of these payments are highly debatable. While most politicians would say that staff costs are a necessary expenses, some do all their own casework.

And suspicion lingers over the practice of MPs putting their family members on the payroll. Some 140 – more than a fifth – were still doing that in 2011/12.

Value for money?

Another big question is whether MPs justify their earnings – and it’s virtually impossible to check how much work British politicians do.

The Commons only sat for 145 days in 2012-13, although many MPs claim they are working hard in their constituencies when not at Westminster. But there is no official record of attendance at Westminster or of constituency work.

The website TheyWorkForYou records how often MPs speak in debates, put written questions to ministers and vote. These are important but not definitive measures of an MP’s activity in the Commons.

Tory MP Philip Hollobone – who was revealed as the MP who claimed the least expenses when the scandal broke in 2009 – has voted in 95 per cent of ballots in this parliament. Former prime minister Gordon Brown has managed just 13 per cent.

One way of looking at the size of a politician’s workload is to measure the number of people he or she represents, the suggestion sometimes being made that Britain has too many MPs per head of population compared to other countries.

Again, international comparisons are problematic, since some countries have one or two houses of parliament with varying responsibilities.

If we take the lower house in the various bicameral system as the equivalent of Britain’s House of Commons, it appears that Britain has the fourth highest ratio of voters to politicians of our 17 countries, with about 97,000 people for one MP.

Spain, Germany, France and the Netherlands have fewer politicians per head of population. Of Europe’s biggest economies, only Italy has more politicians per capita than the UK, if we count all 945 members of both houses of its parliament (they have virtually the same powers).

Most of the countries with fewer voters per politician have much smaller economies and populations. Estonia, with just over one million inhabitants and 101 members, has one politician for every 13,000 people.

The verdict

If Mr Pritchard means that other European countries tend to pay their politicians more, he could well be right in terms of basic salary.

Totting up all the other material benefits to get a really fair comparison is almost impossible, but it’s very unlikely that British MPs are on to a better thing with their expenses than their counterparts in Italy or France.

Having said that, the lack of effective transparency that dogs our system makes it very difficult to be sure.

There is no definitive way of checking how much work your MP is doing, while loopholes in the expenses system mean MPs can still employ close relatives at the public’s expense and claim rent from the taxpayer on a home in London while letting out a second property.

19 reader comments

Richard Edwardssays:

The real issue is not whether they are paid too much (probably) but in a climate of public sector pay freezes, benefit cuts and austerity generally, how could they take an increase without sparking a civil war!

Why are you comparing an MPs wage with the average wage? You should be comparing it to the median (50th percentile), which according to HMRC’s latest figures is £19 500, while the MPs salary puts them on the 97 percentile. Only thus can we get a true picture of the elite, privileged position they occupy compared to the rest of the working population.

Beat me to it! The distribution of earnings is not something nice like a Gaussian so it really does matter whether you use median, mode or mean. The mean is a particularly poor measure of “averageness” for power-law distributions as it’s skewed by those (relatively) few individuals who earn much more than the “average” person. Measuring the percentile of the wealth distribution that the MPs fall into is also a good idea – MP’s could hypothetically only earn slightly more than the mean wage and yet still be at the very top of the earnings lists.

I’m interested to see that a leading Tory Eurosceptic immediately jumps to European comparisons over MPs pay!
It seems to me that there are vastly more people desperate to become MPs than there are numbers of MPs. If we follow the “market forces” dogma espoused by all the main political parties, perhaps each candidate should state what they’d be prepared to do the work for if elected? Then the job could go to the lowest bidder or perhaps some variant of “value for money”? Otherwise, why not the minimum wage & a state pension. That might encourage them to see the plight of people struggling to make ends meet in a different light. If there were particularly strong candidates for selection as MP but who were unable to do the job on minimum wage, the constituency party could top up their pay…another form of “localism” which is so much in favour these days.

Doctors are paid a very generous salary (or so I am told) but do they give a better service tha their equivalent 50 years ago. NO.
The more MPs are paid the more they become separated from their constituents. How can you compare like for like with an elected official from another country? We do not need parliamentary members who salivate over the prospect of excellent salary and expenses plus a guaranteed pension for service..
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“… a £56,450 “golden goodbye” payable to an MP who decides to leave office.”

On that subject I have not seen anybody checking if Chris Hune claimed that allowance after he departed to proclaim his innocence (that is until admitting his guilt and going to prison. Interesting if he claimed anything – as it would in effect be “reward for criminal activity” (a more extreme form of “reward for failure” that this government seems to keep maintaining it is against).

The only cogent yardstick for measuring pay, surely, is real achievement?

Since the late 1950s, what have this collective bunch of Right Honourables actually achieved?

Having been to the House on a number of occasions, it is hugely significant to myself, that invariably the debating chamber is mainly empty and only fills up in a rush when the division bell rings and summons the great and the good from wherever to vote in line with the Whip’s dictates.

Which, clearly, is NOT democratic government!

Sadly, Britain has rapidly accelerated towards the US model, where Special Interest groups, through the unholy influence of lobbyists enjoy far greater sway over policy, than do the supposed “Electors” and taxpayers.

Some years back, I plagiarised GBS’s trite comment into:

“Those who know do: those who think they know teach: and those who actually know little become politicians!”

Why, pray, ought such a motley bunch of self-serving professional egotists deserve X times the annual pay of more humble persons who actually know something?

Another aspect to the debate is that whilst some MPs treat it as a full time job, others are very very part time (when did Gordon Brown last attend the Commons ?). Yet they all get the same. There can be no “fair” salary until the part time nature of the job some MPs do is brought under control.

In practice most MPs would not be prepared to give up their lucrative non-exec directorships, etc., so I suspect the only fair way forward is the introduction of an hourly rate with external monitoring (clock-in/clock-out).

It doesn’t matter how much you pay politicians (of all stripes), there will always be those who never have enough money and live beyond their means, there will always be bribery and corruption.

Which is one very good reason for not trusting ANY individual who wishes to exercise political power. They should ALL be subject to forensic examination of their motives, connections and personal finances – this is called “democracy.”

Please can we have a say on the salaries of Members of Parliament at the ballot box?

The simple edition of three boxes with the option of ticking one of them could be added:

1. Vote for a 10% increase in salary.
2. Vote to keep the salary unchanged.
3. Vote to decrease the salary by 10%.

The ballot papers could be electronically scanned, collated and analysed. The outcome to be immediately translated into the salary for MPs until the next General Election.

It goes without saying we would end the special privileges & statutory exemptions enjoyed by MPs in relation to Income Tax & National Insurance, so they would truly be in the same boat as the rest of us when paying Income Tax &National Insurance.

Unfortunately Italy and Greece are the most fraud countries in Europe . The Political System is in corruption . The MPs are sponsored by bad unhealthy Entrepreneurs. The Mafia has won .

I am Greek and I am not proud for that. Unfortunately the Roman and Ottoman Empire has left negative results in my country. While were the birthplace of Democracy, this is not democracy. There is no nomocracy.

After of independent of Ottoman Empire Greece did not achieve to build a rule of law state like England, Sweden , Germany, Finland and so on.

I consider that New-Greece is not a Western Country but is an Eastern Country ( Same culture with the Turkish People).

There is no western culture in Greece i.e Music derives from the deep of Turkey , mpouzouki and baglamas.

The western kind of music is just Rock n Roll !!!

Modern Philosophy is dead in Greece. Aristotle , Plato were Greeks he are like Greeks .

Fairly , the German and Britain have the best Modern Philosophers they are the offspring of Ancient Greek Philosophers.

Whilst I believe the majority of MP’s are conscientious and dedicated to carrying out their duties unfortunately, it appears, there is a number who are “Part time” and abusing their public commitments. I do think it is good for members to have other interests and employment as long as this does not interfere with their parliamentary duties. With this in mind it is my opinion that the salaries are quite good considering the parliamentary holiday periods and that there are possibilities for talent to be recognised by promotion and increased earnings . However I believe MP’s salaries should be based proportionally on attendance in the Commons, allowing for one day a week constituency work, and a league table of attendance should be made available to voters. This would fairly reward those fully committed to their

It always fascinates me how we slate politicians for earning extortionate wages, and yet seem more than content to accept the wages of footballers, actors and singers. At the top of their game they earn in a week what our Prime Minister (who whatever you think of him has a position of extreme responsibility in running the country!) earns in a year. Lets put that into perspective shall we…..